Kenya and Ethiopia have dominated the IAAF World Cross Country Championships for three decades but it's always a deep international affair.

This is a lament for a missing race, a new gap in our old sport. For the first time in memory, on the third weekend of March, there will be no IAAF World Cross Country Championships.

The event that for more than 100 years has produced some of the greatest of all running performances, from Alf Shrubb to Tinunesh Dibaba, the unique test of multiple skills, long revered among runners as “the toughest race in the world” and the hardest to win, has been cut from this year's schedule. From now on, “world cross” will be held only in alternate years.

It was made at the 47th Congress of the IAAF in August 2009, the same Congress that introduced the “one false start and you're out” rule for sprinters, and thus deprived the 2011 100m world championship of Usain Bolt – so not necessarily the wisest assembly of all-time. Anyway their decision was that world cross will in future be held “every two years alternating with area championships.” If those area champs are intended to build a new competitive base and increase public interest, it doesn't seem to be working. I had to dig deep in the IAAF website to find that the NACAC (North America, Central America and Caribbean) championships will be held on March 17 in Trinidad and Tobago. The event seems unlikely to suffer from an excess of media glare. There's no buzz. Runners used to talk about making the world cross team almost a year ahead of time.

When the IAAF empire took over from the old Europe-based International Cross Country Union in 1973, the mud-and-grass sector was beginning to boom. At those first IAAF world champs, which I watched in Waregem, Belgium, 21 countries had teams, mostly from Europe and North Africa. (The U.S. only had a women's team.) That soon grew. By the 1990s, more than 60 countries were competing every year. The peak came in 2000, when a huge entry of 76 teams took part. In total, 154 countries have put runners into the championships, including such unlikely cross country centers as Equatorial Guinea, Nepal, Hong Kong and Fiji. More than any other one-off competition in any sport, cross country had created a genuinely global event.

World cross was the toughest race in the world because it put every top distance runner on the planet head to head — marathoners, milers, steeplechasers, mountain runners. In 1975, third place was a fierce battle between Bill Rodgers (U.S.) and John Walker (New Zealand). Soon after, Rodgers won the Boston Marathon and Walker broke the world mile record. As a baptism of fire for aspiring runners, nothing came hotter. In the junior men's race of 1978, teenage Gelindo Bordin (Italy), later Olympic marathon champion, finished a modest 19th while and teenage Said Aouita (Morocco), later Olympic and world 5000 champion, was even further back in 34th. The great Haile Gebrselassie tried and failed six times to win at the world cross.

At the peak of the race's success, I described its history and challenge, calling it the “boiling cauldron” of world running, and quoting Paula Radcliffe saying, “It's as good as winning the Olympics or better.” [See Roger Robinson, “Boiling Cauldron: 98 Years of the World Cross Country Championships,” 11/1/2001]

What went wrong? Participation went into decline. By the time I covered the 2008 championships in Edinburgh, Scotland, several once-great cross country nations were total no-shows — even Belgium, which had won the men's title six times since 1903, and hosted the inaugural 1973 IAAF champs. Sebastian Coe led a panel discussion in Edinburgh that tried valiantly to revive interest, but without success.

The causes are easy to identify.

1. Money — the growth in teams made the event costly for the IAAF and host nations to support. In 2002, entry standards were introduced to determine levels of subsidy. The drop-off in numbers dates exactly from then. Top runners, too, became increasingly professional in their choice of races. New events emerged that pay better in the third week of March.

2. Africa — for thirty years, since 1981, no team other than Ethiopia and Kenya has won the senior men's race, and they now equally dominate the women's, and junior men and women. Teams placing high behind them, like Bahrain and Qatar, are the equivalent of Ethiopia/Kenya Lite, stacked with paid ex-pats. It is an extraordinary dominance, unparalleled in any fully international activity, and, as I have often written, a delight to behold. But it does create a problem of incentive.

3. Running — the whole sport has changed radically. Cross country is no longer the way all beginners learn the joy of racing. This weekend, March 17-18, hundreds of thousands of runners, some of them readers of this column, will compete in marathons in Rome, Seoul, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Georgia and Washington DC, while others will lace them up for the New York City Half-Marathon, the Auckland Round the Bays and hundreds of St Patrick's Day and other road races, trail races, mountain races, adventure races, warrior or Spartan races, etc. Old-style cross country is too muddy for them, or not muddy enough. It's out of fashion in the vibrant excitement of this major new movement. Hordes of runners will race their hearts out this weekend, but few could care less whether Kenya beats Ethiopia in world cross.

Yes, all things pass. But let me pay tribute to what is being lost. In my day, if you lacked Olympic track speed, cross country was our one chance to race internationally, represent our country and get some subsidized travel when none of us could afford it. We loved the combination of intense individuality and the patriotic bonding of being part of a team. Even more, we loved the simple joy of racing across real country, merging with the environment, making the earth itself part of your tactics.

World cross has always been considered 'the toughest race in the world' because it includes all types of distance runners, from milers to marathoners.

This month I was with a Flemish-Belgian runner of the 1950s-60s, Jozef Van de Veire. With little language in common, we conversed by eagerly exchanging the names of great Belgians who were heroes to us both. “Roelants!” I would say. “Ah, Polleunis! Lismont!” he would reply. “Puttemans! De Beek!” I cried — and so on. Jozef told me that the amazingly evergreen Marcel Vandewattyne, who placed second in 1946, 1952 and 1962, had died last year. “What a shame!” I said. I told Jozef that our beloved old championship had been cut to every second year. “Jammer!” (“What a shame!”) he said.

International cross country was our Olympics, our Super Bowl, our heroic sports story. I also discovered its proud history, a sport that enriched the 20th century, providing international opportunity for runners who were not rich or gifted, but simple hard-working harriers from post-war backgrounds like mine, like Jozef's, in many countries. When (incredibly) I came to run in world cross myself, it was expanding even more in significance. My first year, 1966, it was held outside Europe for the first time, at Rabat, Morocco, and the first U.S. team took part. Tracy Smith placed third and showed the old cross country world that a new force had arrived.

So I'm sad that for the first time since 1903 (other than in war years) there is no world or open international cross country championship this weekend.

Is the IAAF's response the right one? It seems to me defeatist and lacking imagination. Did no one think of transforming instead of canceling? Did no one consider that an event that brought 76 nations together in one race is too valuable to lose? Did no one take account of its impressive record in athlete development, its contribution to women's running, its value in taking the spectacle of a world championship to places that can never host the Olympics? To abandon the only form of running that has the tribal fan appeal of international teams (think soccer) seems short-sighted, to put it mildly. What right has a single IAAF Congress to cut back something with a longer history than the IAAF?

On Sunday, as a small private protest, I plan to retreat into nostalgia. I'll pore over old books with pictures and descriptions of Alf Shrubb, Jean Bouin and Alain Mimoun, mighty runners in muddy shorts. I shall relive my own memories, as runner, spectator, announcer, or journalist, of Gaston Roelants, Carlos Lopes, John Ngugi, Paul Tergat and Kenenisa Bekele, of Doris Brown Heritage, Grete Waitz, Lynn Jennings, Derartu Tulu, and Tirunesh Dibaba.

Never have men and women run better over the surface of the earth than they ran. Roger Robinson has done many things in a lifetime in running, including racing for England and New Zealand, setting masters records at Boston and New York, being stadium announcer at two Commonwealth Games and serving on a national governing body (“but that was like Alcatraz,” he says). Most of his jobs involve finding words to describe or analyze running; he’s a TV and radio commentator, author of three successful books and senior writer for Running Times, for which he has won two U.S. journalism awards. “Roger on Running” appears monthly on runningtimes.com. Read all of Roger's articles here.